


The Start of Something New

by SingMeloetta



Series: Lumiose High [1]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 07:46:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11642094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SingMeloetta/pseuds/SingMeloetta
Summary: (I apologize for the title)Sage transfers to Lumiose High School, and, like every cliché high school in a modern movie, there's more on the inside than he was expecting.





	The Start of Something New

As soon as he walked into that school, Lumiose High School, to be exact, on the first Monday morning after he had moved from the comfort of Cherrygrove to the hustle bustle life of Lumiose City, Sage could tell that this school, with any hope, wasn’t like the stereotypical ones that he had seen in the movies; A glamorous girl who looked to be wearing some sort of designer outfit was walking alone, having been scrunched up against the lockers, and was narrowly avoiding the path of everyone else walking the halls, and a scrawny, glasses-wearing, geeky looking ginger and another boy who seemed to seemed to be on the bigger side were getting along, and he didn’t feel the need to be sarcastic about that. Maybe this move wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Getting to his first class, however, was exactly like he had expected it to be. The “perfect high school” illusion had worn off, and kids were now sprinting down the hall and shoving each other all over the place, not that he had ever expected that to be any different, as he had been in high school before. Looking at his schedule, which was now crinkled up into every which way, he tried his best to make it on time, if he could just figure out how to read the troublesome map, with its lines and hallways pointing in every which way.

After about 15 seconds past the time where the bell had already rung, he finally managed to find his English classroom (Honors English, his mother would’ve reminded him) plopping down in the first seat he could find. 5 minutes after him, he noticed a slightly familiar face- the same girl who was wearing the designer clothes, was now handing his new English teacher a pass- maybe she was more rebellious than she looked? She did seem out of breath though, by the time she had come through the door, and it was never a good thing to jump to conclusions about someone you’d never met before, as his mother had always told him. As she scanned the room for a seat, she turned to finally fill in the empty seat next to Sage.

Paying no attention to him, his teacher, a young someone with purple-hair, quickly started the lesson, which had something to do with symbolism. Sage couldn’t really remember, as he was too busy thinking about who these people were and how he’d fit into the story of it all. Sure, his daydreaming would probably come back to bite him sometime down the road, but he couldn’t help himself; This school already had some interesting characters from the looks of it, and he desperately wanted information on the unknown, or anything that would help him get in on the know about the other kids. 

Next on his schedule was Baking Arts; He didn’t actually mind that class, but the thought of once again being the only guy in the period made him secretly sweat. When he actually got to class (on time, surprisingly) he was surprised to see one of the boys from earlier, the bulky one who had been hanging out with the nerd, sitting in the front row. As he looked nice, and there was an empty seat right by him, he reluctantly sat down and tried to avoid eye contact.

“For this project, you’ll be working with the person to your left to bake a cake from scratch. As this is the first time baking an actual cake this year, the theme will be something simple; A sweet theme.” After a quick glance to his left to look if he was seeing things correctly, he realized that he was being paired with the other boy. 

“Hey, aren’t you new here?” Sage quickly nodded in response to the boy’s question, hoping this wasn’t leading to the part of his dreams where he’d get taken out of class only to be found days later as a dead body that was haphazardly stuffed in a locker.

“It’s nice to meet you, my name's Tierno.”

“Sage.”

“Well, Sage, let’s get working on this cake! I was thinking of a chocolate cake with Pecha-marshmallow frosting, with some of those candied Cheri Berries -only the sweet ones- on top.”

“How do we know which ones are the sweet ones and which ones are still spicy?”

“Easy!” He tossed one of his Pokeballs lightly from his belt, releasing a Slurpuff. “Macaron, could you give us the sweet Cheri Berries, please? And then could you put them in this bowl here? That’d be wonderful, thanks!” The Meringue Pokemon diligently worked and plucked away at the sweet berries, while Tierno was removing the leaves from the Pecha berries. For a good while, all Sage could do was watch in awe; It was as if though he was a professional baker.

“Sage, could you start prepping the cake?” Tierno had turned around to look at him, while he was still hopelessly looking on at his baking skills. 

“Sure, of course. Sorry for being a load.” That was all Sage could stammer as he started helping the cake come together.

Within about an hour and a half, it was done. It had been decorated like a little girl’s birthday cake, but he didn't mind, if that’s how Tierno liked to make his cakes. After all, Tierno was much better at this than he ever had been. Soon after they had set the small cake down and cut it into pieces

“Hey, Sage, if we have lunch hour together, you wanna come sit with my table? None of them bite, I promise.”

“Sure! I’d like that, Tierno.”

The majority of his third period class that had to pass by before lunch hour (Which had only been Study Hall, so he hadn’t blanked out on much) passed him by pretty quickly, as he was being overwhelmed by the fact that he had actually managed to make a friend, and that friend was giving him the chance to meet more of his friends. Things were rather boring in this class though, he thought, as he didn’t see any slightly-familiar faces.

With his lunchbox in hand, he nervously wandered into the crowded cafeteria and tried seeking out Tierno’s Vanillite T-shirt. Luckily, Teirno wasn’t someone who was easy to miss, even in large crowds like these.

“Hey Sage, see you actually found us!” He looked around at the rest of his table mates, who were all focused on the new kid. He recognized one of them, that being the fancily-dressed girl from his English class.“Guys, this is Sage, he’s in my Culinary Arts class. Sage, this is my squad; Cal, Shaunie, Trevs, and Princess.”

“Those are just some silly nicknames we made up when we were kids.” A brunette boy brushed it off, looking back down the table at Tierno, where Tierno was pouting about how they were special and not stupid or silly in the slightest. “I’m Calem, the ginger is Trevor, The one wearing all those ribbons is Shauna, and the one with the pretty dress is Madison.” Madison blushed at his comment, but if you would’ve blinked, you would’ve missed it.

“Hey Princess, I brought you some cake!” He said, unwrapping the tinfoil and sliding the cake-topped plastic plate down to her, along with a fork. “That one’s a chocolate cake with Pecha-marshmallow frosting. This piece of cake was brought to you by Sage and I, and supported by near-anorexics like you. Thank you.”

“Tierno, bless your soul.” She smiled, then paused. “But I’m not even sure I should have this. I mean, our first concert of the season is coming up and Mr. Pelagias is going to start putting us through the audition gauntlet at rehearsal today. Wouldn’t want to screw that up, not for the all the cake in the world.” She mused, sliding the piece of cake back over to Teirno.

“Princess, come on, you’re only like, his best soprano. Wouldn’t want him to lose you to starvation now, would we?”

Madison looked at Tierno like he had just turned into a Pikachu. “There’s no way I’m his best soprano. For all I know the only reason why Mr. Pelagias pretends to like me so much is that Principal Sycamore’s been pulling strings to get me this far.”

“Princess, if your dad was pulling strings, you wouldn’t have to be up looking over your choir music at midnight as if it were the bible. But you do, so, there’s at least a little bit of dedication somewhere.”

“The principal is your dad?”

“That’s right! And our very own Princess is taking this whole school by storm, even on her own charms!” Trevor snickered for a bit before getting out his camera to take pictures of her. “Smile for the paparazzi, dahling!” From what Sage could figure out, they usually weren’t allowed to take pictures of students for no reason, but maybe that was one of the ways this school was so different. 

“Wha- Hey, stop it, I’m not a celebrity!” She blocked the flashing of the camera with her hands, hoping Trevor wouldn’t be spiteful enough to put these in the next school newspaper.

“Yes you are! Come on, lead role in the winter musical, top soprano of the best honor choir, gets invited to every party this school has ever thrown, literally has her own fan club-” 

“Trevor, you and I both know that was all last year. Who knows, this year could end up being the worst year of my life?”

“Ooh, looks like you’ve changed into a Debbie Downer over the summer! Don’t want to get into a scandal this early into the year, now do we?” Trevor mocked as he finally set his camera down, exchanging it for a notepad and pencil.

“Shut up.” She grumbled childishly as she dusted off her skirt and got up from the table to put her lunch tray away. Honestly, if there weren’t so many other kids and an overblown fear of someone having an allergic reaction, they probably wouldn’t even need to wash it.

Gym class was next on his schedule, almost as if whoever decided their schedules wanted to intentionally make the class suffer through an embarrassing puke story of their own. Luckily, if he ever had to endure one of those moments, he’d at least have Madison -or could he get away with calling her Princess now?- in his class to help him cope with the worst of it.

His teacher, Mr. Georges, seemed to be nice enough for a gym teacher, but his sense of style did seem to be at least the tiniest odd, with the evidence being the brightly colored rocks he wore in his hair. 

Of course, the buddy system rule only applied if she made it to class before it happened. Just like in English, she strolled into class about 3 minutes past the tardy bell, and, as an added offence, still wasn’t changed into her gym clothes by the time she did finally arrive. 

Surprisingly though, the gym teacher didn’t seem to want to rip her head off, from what Sage could lipread from their conversation; He was calm and understanding with her, as if he already knew what was going to go on through the year in terms of her whole “changing” thing.

The warm ups, as expected of any high school gym teacher, even at the beginning of the year, were brutal; 10 laps around the gym, followed by 45 push ups, followed themselves by 60 curl ups. By the end of the instructions, Sage swore that he could already feel a burning sensation in his feet. Sage however, had noticed one key detail while he was “watching” Madison exercise: she was clearly skimping out on her warm ups, and yet Mr. Georges didn’t bat an eye, while still being a cliche gym teacher, yelling his head off towards everybody else who he saw slowing down for a millisecond, which had to be another part of their unspoken contract.

They spoke at the water fountains; Other people were around to help him defend his case, but it was still quiet enough in the hallway for them to hear each other. “Hey Princess, why didn’t you have to do the warm ups?”

“I was. Didn’t you see me running?”

“Well, it just felt like your run was more like a slight speed walk, and you know you’re not allowed to do those modified push ups, right?”

He stopped rambling when he noticed that the other kids who were waiting in line all had no choice but to gawk at him like he had just summoned Giratina, while Madison gave him a glare that could probably freeze a Darmanitan. “First of all, you may not call me Princess, just so you know for the future. I’ll let you know when you can do that. Second of all, the reason why I can’t push myself as hard as some of the others is simple: It’s none of your business.”

As she sauntered back into the gym, his mind had found a laser sharp focus on all the “oohs” and the “roasted!” that were coming from the crowd who herded their way back into the gym after her.

He was never going to live this down.

It’s needless to say that after the water fountain incident, Sage couldn’t concentrate for the rest of gym class, even as a multi-colored rain of dodge balls came flying for his chest. Luckily, after gym class, it was finally time to go home. How to explain today to his mom though? He couldn’t just shrug it off with a “good” because he was an idiot when it came to hiding how he felt about things, but then how do you describe “I made like maybe one or two almost friends, but then during gym class I accidentally offended the principal’s daughter and now she probably hates me?”

His tired body still had some dragging on to do though, as his house was somehow close enough to the school to make them walk home. “Hey Sage!” He glanced to see Shauna waving him over, and Tierno and Calem, who were standing beside her; Tierno was smiling, maybe even wider than Shauna was. Calem, on the other hand, looked fine with running into him after school, and, considering that Sage might have dissed his girlfriend, it was good enough for him that he wasn’t yet getting beaten to a pulp.

“Where are Trevor and Madison?”

“They live in the city, so they ride the buses home. Not to mention that Madison has a ride home from her father everyday anyways.”  
“Oh. Well, that makes sense, considering her dad's the principal and all.” Sage blushed and rambled as they began the walk home.  
“So, Sage, see anyone ya like yet?” Shauna nudged at his elbow playfully, while Trevor readied his notepad.  
“What! No, of course not, I only know 5 people out of the entire school!”  
“So, how do you like those five people, then? Come on now, the question isn't that hard to figure out!”  
“If I have to be honest, Madison’s a bit of an ice queen, actually. I don’t get how everybody else thinks she’s so nice. Like, what has she done that gets her a fan club?”

“Well, you see, she can just be a little slow to open up towards people she doesn’t know very well. She's really nice, it just takes time for her to adjust to new faces.”  
“But when we all ate lunch together, she seemed fine, and then when we were in gym class she got really mad at me for some reason.”  
The other three looked at him just like the kids at the water fountain. “That was you? Dude, what did you have to do to her? Pissing off Madison takes skill!”  
"All I asked her was why she got to skip out on all those warm ups. I wasn't trying to piss her off."

"I'm surprised you haven't been expelled. If Principal Sycamore had found out that you had made his Princess mad, he'd be after you for the next 4 years and never let you out of his sight. I'm sure he's already launched an entire investigation already." Calem chuckled, giving Sage a friendly pat on the back. 

Maybe, if he kept these friends, his school life would turn out fine after all.


End file.
